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The Arts

The arts have their own distinct languages that use both verbal and non-verbal conventions, mediated by selected processes and technologies. Through movement, sound, and image, the arts transform people’s creative ideas into expressive works that communicate layered meanings.

Learning in, through, and about the arts stimulates creative action and response by engaging and connecting thinking, imagination, senses, and feelings. By participating in the arts, students’ personal well-being is enhanced. As students express and interpret ideas within creative, aesthetic, and technological frameworks, their confidence to take risks is increased.

Arts education values student’s experiences and builds on these with increasing sophistication and complexity as their knowledge and skills develop. Through the use of creative and intuitive thought and action, learners in the arts are able to view their world from new perspectives. Through the development of arts literacies, students, as creators, presenters, viewers, and listeners, are able to participate in, interpret, value, and enjoy the arts throughout their lives

The arts are powerful forms of expression that recognize, value, and contribute to the unique local and international cultural character of AISD.

In the Elementary School

Visual Arts

The primary goal of Visual Arts at AISD is for students to express themselves through a variety of mediums. The program provides many opportunities for learners to deeply explore mediums of their choice, try new mediums and techniques, and achieve success through trial, error, reflection and class critiques. The art room is divided into five centers: drawing, printmaking, painting, sculpture and collage. At the beginning of each lesson, a concept is introduced and techniques are demonstrated in a particular medium. The students then choose how they want to “solve” the art problem presented to them and express their understanding of the concept being taught. The lesson, “A Building That Shows Emotion,” for example, could be drawn, painted, sculpted, collaged, etc. as long as the student can communicate through their art and explain how artists show emotion through their creations.

Music

Through Music at AISD, students are given the opportunity to learn, communicate and express themselves in alternate ways from their homeroom classrooms. Students sing, move, create, play, inquire and perform within the music classroom using standard notation, invented symbols, songs, games, and other activities. In addition to a focus on music, drama and dance are interwoven. Students demonstrate and perform for peers and parents at various times throughout the year.

ES Musical

The ES Musical occurs every year and involves students in grades 3, 4, and 5. Any student in these grade levels can participate, as long as they are committed to rehearsals and performances. There are two or three performances at the end of the rehearsal period.

In the Middle School

AISD's Middle School Arts focuses on enhancing technical skills as much as creativity.

MS Art students learn to become innovators, out of the box thinkers, and not just artists. A variety of mediums are used, from clay sculpture to claymation, sketches to printmaking, watercolor to graffiti art. Any MS student can succeed in art, and are taught that all it needs is some initiative, effort, and of course, creativity.

In the High School

High School students have a unique perspective being young thinkers and creators influenced often by pop culture.

In the High School they will learn to refine their techniques in 2 dimensional, 3 dimensional and new digital media by looking at different socio-cultural forms of art making. They will begin to introduce themselves to the foundations of art and prepare themselves for life after High School whether they choose to study in IB Visual Art and other classes. All they need to succeed is a passion for visual communication, perseverance and willingness to try new things.